Creativity Quote by David Hockney

There’s a sly, deadpan brilliance to Hockney’s advice: it sounds like a cheapskate hack, but it’s really a manifesto about attention. “Always live in the ugliest house on the street” flips the normal status game of property into an artist’s problem of perception. If your home is the neighborhood trophy, you end up staring at it, maintaining it, defending it. If it’s the eyesore, you’re freed from the narcissistic loop of self-display. You can look outward instead.

Hockney has spent a career insisting that seeing is an active, chosen act - not a passive reception of prettiness. The joke works because it smuggles an aesthetic ethic into a real-estate proverb. The “ugliest house” isn’t about misery; it’s about refusing to let your environment dictate your identity. It’s also a practical antidote to taste as social anxiety: if you opt out of competing for “the best,” you also opt out of the constant micro-judgment of surfaces.

There’s a quiet class critique underneath the quip, too. In consumer culture, beauty is often purchased as reassurance. Hockney suggests the opposite: buy yourself room to think. The punchline - “then you don’t have to look at it” - lands because it admits a harsh truth about self-curation. Sometimes the thing you’re most trapped by is the thing you’re most proud of.